2 thoughts on “Indian Wedding @ Nilai Convention Centre”

Thanks for your question. It’s not that we don’t mic up the toms.. we do sometimes.. but one thing you should note is that using more microphones doesn’t mean you’ll get a better sound. With more microphones, you need much more time in setting up and tuning and u got to worry about issues such as phase cancellation between microphones which will result in a thin sound. As we know that sound wave is in Sinusoidal form, phase cancellation is the result of destructive interference due to the superposition of 2 waveforms what are out of phase with each other. If you know physics you’ll get what i mean or you can read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference

Most of the time, we keep it simple simply because the setup time isn’t sufficient. With a good quality overhead microphone, you can actually get quite a good tom-tom sound, however positioning and aiming the mic is very crucial. Even with a basic setup (kick, snare and 2 overhead mics), you’ll sometimes find that one or two of the mics have to be reversed phase /polarity to avoid phase cancellation effect between mics. (that’s the function of the phase button found in professional mixers) Phase cancellation happens when 2 or more mics that are close together pick up the same sound source at a different time few milliseconds apart. (For example, when the sound from the toms are picked up by their own mic as well as the overhead mics, if the sound wave picked up by the tom mic and overhead mics are out of phase, you’ll get a very thin sound). However most mixers in the market only allows you to change the phase by 180 degrees, there’s no option to tweak between 0-180 degrees. You’ll then have to play with the positioning of the mic to find the perfect sweet spot (full body sound) that’s when there’s minimal phase cancellation.

My conclusion is factors such as time, nature of music, acoustics of the hall, echo problems will play a part in deciding whether i want simple mic setup (3-4 mics) or complex setup (8-10 mics) in miking up the drum set. I hope that is helpful.

Hi there,
i’ve been looking through the events you guys did and i’m just wondering…how come you guys don’t mic up the tom toms of the drums instead just use overhead microphones? just wondering. pls advice me on this. thx and appreciate your reply.